Saturday, June 27, 2015

After seeing
and mourning the destruction
caused by the flood, we wondered just what had happened to allow the river to
catch us off-guard. While we moved as swiftly as possible once we realized
what was happening, we were certainly not expecting a flood that night. There
has been only one other major flood in the twenty-seven year history of the
hyena project, during January 1998. This one, however, was
much higher than the last, and occurred during what has historically been the
dry season in Kenya.

Our friends Chris Dutton
and Amanda Subalusky at The Mara Project have data loggers positioned along the
Talek River, which allow us to see what actually happened on that fateful
night. At the beginning, the river rose 2.5 meters (8 feet!) within an hour. At
that point, it breached its banks, so while the volume of water continued to
grow exponentially, its height changed more slowly. In total, the river rose 5
meters (16 feet) that night, which explains how so much of our camp was
underwater within the span of a few hours.

A graph of the Talek River depth including the night of June 13th (from MaMaSe)

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